As reported in “Virginia Telehealth News Weekly” the Virginia Acute Stroke Telehealth (VAST) network received Rural Healthcare Pilot Project funding to build a telecommunications backbone for telemedicine and telehealth to primarily support stroke care and health information technology.
The vision for VAST is to design and implement a robust, secure, sustainable telehealth network that has sufficient scalable high capacity links communicating from the hubs to the cloud. The goal is to support healthcare applications of the end-to-end networks to allow for seamless and dynamic routing for data from the hub-managed partners to hub-managed partners.
Telehealth application will include the transfer of images, ability to share electronic health records, provide consultations, information on disaster readiness, clinical research, and provide for health education applications.
Participating network hubs will be the University of Virginia Health System (Charlottesville), Culpeper Regional Hospital (Culpeper), Eastern Shore Rural Health System (Nassawadox, and Middle Peninsula-Northern Neck Community Service Board (Saluda).
VAST in issuing the RFP is soliciting bids from vendors, suppliers, and service providers to provide connectivity. The network is seeking consolidate bids and partial bids.
VAST expects to receive competitive offers for network deployment from independent telephone companies, local exchange carriers, cable operators, hardware distributors, manufacturers, cabling and construction contractors, and others.
Questions on the VAST RFP need to be submitted in writing. Email Eugene Sullivan Assistant Project Coordinator, located at the University of Virginia, Office of Telemedicine at evs5w@virginia.edu. The RFP is posted on www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/pub/office-of-telemedicine.
